If Only US Law Applied to the US Government

by Paul Craig Roberts

The U.S. government does not have a monopoly
on hypocrisy, but no other government can match the hypocrisy of the U.S. government.

It is now well documented and known all over the world that the U.S. government
tortured detainees at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and that the U.S. government
has had people kidnaped and "renditioned," that is, transported to
Third World countries, such as Egypt, to be tortured.

Also documented and well known is the fact that the U.S. Department of Justice
provided written memos justifying the torture of detainees. One torture advocate
who wrote the DOJ memos that gave the green light to the Bush regime's use
of torture is John Yoo, who somehow secured a U.S. Justice Department appointment
and a tenured professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, Boalt
Hall School of Law.

Members of Berkeley's city council believe that Yoo should be charged with
war crimes. The U.S. government has charged lesser offenders than Yoo with
war crimes. Yoo helped the DOJ achieve the Bush regime's goal of finding a
way around the torture prohibitions of both U.S. statutory law and the Geneva
Conventions.

The way around the law that Yoo provided for the sadistic Bush regime was
closed down by the U.S. Supreme Court, which voided Yoo's arguments, and Yoo's
torture memo was rescinded by the Department of Justice. Nevertheless, Yoo's
obvious constitutional incompetence, which in Yoo's case is total, has not
affected his position as professor of constitutional law at Berkeley. Can you
imagine the harm Yoo is doing by teaching future cadres of lawyers and government
officials that torture is consistent with the Constitution and the law of the
land? How many of us will suffer from this ignorant man's teachings?

But I digress. Even as the U.S. government was torturing people, the U.S.
government was prosecuting the son of Charles Taylor, the former ruler of Liberia,
for torturing political opponents of his father's government. The U.S. government
did not employ the Yoo torture memo to justify Liberia's use of torture against
those who wished to overthrow the Liberian government or commit terror against
it. The U.S. government's position is that Liberia's government had no right
to use torture to defend itself. Only an "indispensable nation" such
as the U.S. has the right to torture people who are imagined to threaten it.

I use the word "imagined" because approximately 99 percent of the
detainees tortured by America were totally innocent people picked up at random
or sold to the stupid Americans by warlords as "terrorists." (The
U.S. government offered rewards for terrorists, like the bounty offered for
outlaws in the "Wild West." The result was that warlords in Afghanistan
and Pakistan grabbed whoever was not one of them and sold their captives to
Americans as "terrorists.")

While Chuckie's trial was underway, the Bush regime was torturing people.

The Washington Post writes that Chuckie's conviction is "the first
test of an American law that gives prosecutors the power to bring charges for
acts of torture committed in foreign lands." In other words, U.S. law
against torture applies to the entire world, to every other country except
the United States. The hubris is unimaginable – no country can torture
except the U.S.

Anyone else who tortures gets life, or, in the case of Saddam Hussein, gets
hung by the neck until dead.

Isn't it great to be an American? Our laws don't apply to us, only to every
other nation. This is what it means to be the moral light of the world, the
unipower, the salt of the earth.

Neither poor Carrie Johnson nor her editors at the Washington Post
see the irony or the paradox. Johnson writes that the U.S. prosecutors "accused
Taylor of taking part in atrocities and directing subordinates to torture victims
using … electrical devices from 1999 to 2002." That charge practically
overlaps in time with Bush's, or Cheney's, or Yoo's, or the DOJ's, or Rumsfeld's,
or whoever's direction to subordinates to torture people detained by Americans
at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and in various CIA rendition sites. By now everyone
in the world has seen the photograph of the hooded Iraqi with electrical wires
attached standing on that box in Abu Ghraib.

If only American laws applied to the American government. Then the criminals
who have been in charge for eight years could be prosecuted for their extreme
violation of United States laws. But, of course, the great, moral American
government is far above the law. American law only applies to dispensable nations.
America is not answerable to law, not to its own law and not to international
law. U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey affirmed that the U.S. government
is above all law when he told the Senate Judiciary Committee that there would
be no investigation or prosecution of those Bush regime officials who authorized
torture and those who carried out the sadistic acts.

The American government, the government of the great, indispensable nation,
has a free pass. The strong do what they will. The weak suffer what they must.

Paul Craig Roberts
wrote the Kemp-Roth bill and was assistant secretary of the Treasury
in the Reagan administration. He was associate editor of the Wall
Street Journal editorial page and contributing editor of National
Review. He is author or co-author of eight books, including
The
Supply-Side Revolution (Harvard University Press). He has
held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon
chair in political economy, Center for Strategic and International
Studies, Georgetown University, and senior research fellow, Hoover
Institution, Stanford University. He has contributed to numerous
scholarly journals and testified before Congress on 30 occasions.
He has been awarded the U.S. Treasury's Meritorious Service Award
and the French Legion of Honor. He was a reviewer for the Journal
of Political Economy under editor Robert Mundell.

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